Ursula's Words and Images, 2015

That's my photo of some tiny mushrooms that were growing seemingly everywhere after all the rain we had in California in December.

Hello, and welcome to my thread. I'm Ursula, and I spent last year hanging out in the 75 books group, at least until July, at which point I decided I was simply Over It. This year I'm going to try having a home at Club Read instead and hope that it goes a little better.

At the moment, I live in California. I read fiction, a combination of whatever catches my eye and things that are on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. I go through a decent amount of non-fiction as well, mostly in audio form listened to while I'm running or drawing.

I plan to share my reading, obviously, and also probably photos and drawings. Here's to 2015!

Currently Reading:

Language learning

Current:
      

Completed:

        

    
    

Time: 34h, 53m

On Hiatus: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►January◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
Journey to the Centre of the Earth - finished Jan. 2 (225 pages) - ♥♥♥½ (review)
Code Name Verity - finished Jan. 8 (343 pages) - ♥♥ (review)
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman - finished Jan. 12 (audio, 23h 52m) - ♥♥♥♥ (review)
Station Eleven - finished Jan. 15 (333 pages) - ♥♥♥♥ (review)
The Book of Disquiet - finished Jan. 16 (262 pages) - ♥♥♥♥1/2 (review)
I'm Not Scared - finished Jan. 20 (200 pages) - ♥♥♥♥♥ (review)
Anna Karenina - finished Jan. 20 (807 pages) - ♥♥♥♥1/2 (review)
All the Light We Cannot See - finished Jan. 23 (531 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2 (review)
Orlando - finished Jan. 29 (333 pages) - ♥♥♥♥ (review)
A Pleasure and a Calling - finished Jan. 29 (281 pages) - ♥♥♥ (review)
The Red Queen - finished Jan. 30 (audio, 12h 52m) - ♥♥♥ (review)

January Total: 11
January Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►February◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
Blood and Guts in High School - finished Feb. 7 (165 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
The Maltese Falcon - finished Feb. 7 (196 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Ice Ship - finished Feb. 8 (316 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
Venice: Pure City - finished Feb. 13 (audio, 14h 1m) - ♥♥♥ (review)
Invisible Cities - finished Feb. 18 (165 pages) - ♥♥♥♥♥ (review)
The Two Worlds of Marcel Proust - finished Feb. 24 (252 pages) - ♥♥1/2 (review)
City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran - finished Feb. 26 (audio, 9h 18m) - ♥♥
A Tale of Two Cities - finished Feb. 28 (382 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2

February Total: 8
February Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►March◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
The Italians - finished Mar. 4 (316 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
The Castle of Otranto - finished Mar. 8 (116 pages) - ♥♥♥
Untouchable - finished Mar. 15 (167 pages) - ♥♥♥
The Italians - finished Mar. 27 (352 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - finished Mar. 28 (audio, 14h 35m) - ♥♥♥
Boy, Snow, Bird - finished Mar. 30 (308 pages) - ♥♥1/2

March Total: 6
March Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►April◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
Shakespeare Saved My Life - finished Apr. 6 (291 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
Deadline in Athens - finished Apr. 7 (295 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
Ciao, America! - finished Apr. 11 (242 pages) - ♥♥
It's What I Do - finished Apr. 13 (audio, 9h 7m) - ♥♥♥1/2
Two Lives - finished Apr. 27 (375 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Infinite Jest - finished Apr. 27 (1079 pages) - ?????
How Soccer Explains the World - finished Apr. 28 (261 pages) - ♥♥

Total Pages Read: 8593
Total Time Listened: 83h 45m

Male Authors: 23
Female Authors: 9

Fiction: 19
Nonfiction: 13

1001 List Books: 13

Last year, I started keeping track of where the books I read are set. I don't have any specific plans to cover the globe, but I've enjoyed watching the map change as I make haphazard progress.


Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

2015
Portugal: The Book of Disquiet
India: Untouchable

Covered in 2014:
Afghanistan
Australia
Canada
China
Colombia
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Egypt
Ethiopia
France
Germany
Greece
Haiti
Iran
Italy
Japan
Latvia
Mexico
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Russia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
United States
Vietnam

I loved Memoirs of Hadrian when I read it, so long ago I can no longer remember it. Time for a re-read. Are you enjoying it?

I've placed my star, Ursula, and look forward to your reading and pictures.

Jules Verne had quite the imagination. I listened to Around the World in 80 Days this year, and enjoyed it as much as the first time I read it. I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea many many years ago. I think that Journey to the Center of the Earth is one that I never read, but I have watched the film.

>1 ursula: Welcome Ursula. With a Currently Reading mix like that, I look forward to your thoughts on your reading, knowing I'll enjoy them.

>4 ipsoivan: I am enjoying it immensely. I'm kind of in awe how authentic it feels (not that I am anything approaching knowledgeable about the time period or Hadrian).

>5 NanaCC: Good to see you! This is the first Verne I've ever read. I like it so far, but the plot is just now making some real progress.

>6 SassyLassy: Thanks! I do try to keep a mix going so that it's easier to keep track of each book, or just so that I can jump back and forth between eras of language and not get bogged down (hopefully).

Well, Memoirs of Hadrian didn't make it into the new year; I finished it yesterday afternoon. I'm hoping to be more consistent with writing reviews again, but at the very least I'll try to get a few thoughts down here. It's impressive to me that Yourcenar managed to make ancient Rome come so vividly alive - not only because it seems like it would be easy to either veer into cliché or modernize characters' thoughts, but also because she does it from maybe the flattest point of view imaginable, a letter from one man to another. Of course, Hadrian would seem to be no ordinary man, and he is writing to another future emperor, Marcus Aurelius, which is a great way to give leeway to write about grander things and yet keep it personal.

After finishing that, I picked up Anna Karenina for take 2 of trying to read it. I got about halfway through a few years ago on my first attempt. I was struggling with Russian agrarian reform and peasant stuff, country vs. city life issues that were obscure to me, and just a general lack of understanding of the "Russianness" of it all. But I attempted to slog on to find out what was going to happen ... until someone mentioned the ending to me. Okay, look, I'm not one of those people who screams "spoiler!" about hundred-year-plus old novels, but at that particular moment it was not the thing I needed to hear. The only string I was hanging onto was finding out how it all ended. So I closed the book and figured I'd try it again later. And now, it's later!

So suddenly my reading is 2/3 Russian, with the audio biography of Catherine the Great also going. I didn't plan it that way, but my reading seems to go in waves anyway. Last year I kept finding myself reading books set in France while doing a year-long read of In Search of Lost Time.

As it's the last day of the year, I might as well put a cap on my 2014 reading here with the notables and not-so-notables in my opinion.

I read 112 books in 2014.

Best: Testament of Youth (memoir), Buddha's Little Finger (fiction), Salt Sugar Fat (non-fiction), Alamut (fiction), Hunger (fiction), The Remains of the Day (fiction), Where I'm Calling From (short stories).

Worst: The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared (fiction), A Town Like Alice (fiction), The Man Who Loved Children (fiction), 1421 ("non-fiction")

Major Project Completed: In Search of Lost Time.

Happy New Year!

Nice to see a new face. From your few comments above, some of our reading and the photo, I suppose I may like quite some of your reading, so I'll pop in every now and then. I have never been active on the 75er Group, but looked at the phenomenon (with horror and mainly confusion). I would never be able to keep up, there.

Welcome ursula to club read.

Those Jules Verne books are surprisingly good, I read Journey to the Centre of the Earth a couple of years ago.

>10 NanaCC: Happy New Year! I'm here near the edge of the earth in the Pacific time zone, so I still have hours to go till the official start of the new year. And I'm particularly anxious to see this one end, too.

>11 edwinbcn: Feel free to drop in whenever you find the time and inclination, I'm always pleased to meet people! After participating for a few years, I think the 75 Group has a certain culture that maybe I don't really fit into.

>12 baswood: Thank you! I got a little disconnected from the story with all the walking and such, but now that there are creatures, I'm involved again. I'm thinking my daughter should read this one since she's studying geology in college. I bet she'd get a kick out of it.

Just dropping by to say hello and put a star here. I'm especially interested in your readings of Jules Vernes and Tolstoy.

First run of the new year was completed on a very chilly (right at freezing) morning. My husband and I did actually stay up till midnight, and even had a couple of festive beverages while watching a movie (The Lego Movie), but it only delayed my morning run by about 10 minutes. Good start to the year.

>14 OscarWilde87: Nice to see you! I'm about 1/4 of the way through the Tolstoy at the moment. It's going pretty quickly as my "afternoon" read. That's when I read the stuff I've gotta be awake for, and last year that spot was at least partially occupied by In Search of Lost Time, so this is taking over that spot for now.

Maybe the other Russian reads will make Anna Karenina easier? Happy to see Remains of the Day on your best list. I read a different novel by Ishiguro which I didn't enjoy, but a friend had the same reaction while liking Remains of the Day, so it's still on my list to read.

Your too brief but intriguing comments about Memoirs of Hadrian remind me that I need to add that to my wish list. Thanks for the reminder!

>16 mabith: Maybe! Last time I tried it I don't think I'd read any other Russian books before except Dead Souls in a college class a million years ago and a failed attempt at Crime and Punishment. I did get through a few Russian books last year though, and now it's sort of interesting to have my non-fiction reading taking place (with where I am currently in it) about 100 years earlier than Anna Karenina's setting.

What was the Ishiguro novel you didn't enjoy?

>17 Poquette: Glad to provide a reminder! I hope you like it when you get to it. :)

It was Never Let Me Go, a choice in my book club. I don't think any of us really liked it and I particularly found it fairly pointless. The writing was lovely, but I found the characters unrealistic for their circumstances and the lack of explanation was vexing.

>9 ursula: Not read last year, but in other years I shared a couple you listed as your best: Testament of Youth and The Remains of the Day. Both wonderful. Of your worst: I read A Town Like Alice a very long time ago and didn't care for it much at the time. I think it would become dated, which wouldn't add to the appeal.

Looking forward to following your reading.

>19 mabith: I read that one as well, and gave it a good rating, although I was left with a vague feeling that I didn't like it much.

>20 VivienneR: A Town Like Alice was very dated, in my opinion. I understand reading racism according to the time period, but it was distasteful to me as it was used there. I mean, using a racial slur as a term of endearment for your (white) beloved? Ugh. The rest of the story just didn't make up for that sort of thing to me.

I never read the book A Town Like Alice, but there was a BBC production probably in the 1980s starring Bryan Brown that appeared on Masterpiece Theater in the US, and it was one of the most memorable and heart-wrenching things I ever saw on Masterpiece Theater. From what you're saying the TV production must have been cleaned up. I have always wanted to read the book, but maybe I'll just be content with memories of that marvelous TV adaptation.

First book finished, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I'd classify it as "pretty thoroughly okay." I liked how overbearingly sure of himself the Professor was, kind of like an extra-obnoxious, lecture-y and impatient Sherlock Holmes.

In other news, my libraries are trying to kill me. Somehow all my holds came in at once - one physical hold that I was expecting, and 2 ebooks that get queued up after Code Name Verity. I won't be turning on my wireless on the Kindle for a while so that I can get through those! All while I'm chugging along (no pun intended) on Anna Karenina.

>22 Poquette: I don't know - I am kind of an outlier on that book, from what I can tell. Many, many people seem to find it a wonderful read and worthy of rereading. But I can definitely understand the trepidation at the possibility of having a negative experience with a story you liked so much in another format.

Ursula, have you ever seen the movie Journey to the Center of the Earth starring James Mason and Pat Boone. Filmed in the 1950's, it is typical of that type of movie for the time. As a little girl, I thought it was wonderful. I know there was an updated version in 2008 with Brendan Frasier. I'm sure the technical aspects were much better, but there was something appealing about the sci fi movies of the 50's.

>23 ursula:

like an extra-obnoxious, lecture-y and impatient Sherlock Holmes

Nicely put. Seems to me that the character of the professor was quite impressive.

>23 ursula: I also recently read Journey to the Center of the Earth and have to agree with you. It's a fun, silly story which could be gripping at times, but there is not much in the way of character development. I wish I had read an edition with extras, as I wanted to know more about which geological bits were true and which have been disproved and more about the theories current in Verne's time.

>24 NanaCC: I haven't. I admit I haven't seen many '50s sci-fi movies either. I'd lean toward that one before the Brendan Fraser remake though, definitely! My husband might be interested in seeing it as well, I'll see if we can get our hands on it.

>25 OscarWilde87: He was a piece of work, definitely!

>26 ELiz_M: I wanted to know more about which geological bits were true and which have been disproved and more about the theories current in Verne's time.

I was curious about the same things. I'm thinking I'll try to get my daughter to read it. She's in her 3rd year studying geology in college.

There are glorious descriptions of Icelandic landscape in Journey to the Centre of the Earth as I seem to remember.

>28 baswood: Iceland is indeed described in a quite detailed manner as the group travels to their volcano to enter the earth. I think it's probably hard to describe Iceland without the result being glorious - it seems like a beautiful and interesting place!

Feeling a little nostalgic this evening, I guess, so here's a moody photo. Last year at this time my husband and I had just returned from living in Gent, Belgium for 6 months. When we left, the Christmas market was still up in the city center, including the ferris wheel seen here in front of St. Bavo's cathedral, home of the Van Eyck altarpiece, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. I didn't get to see the cathedral's tower without scaffolding as it was (and is) under long-term restoration work.

Love your picture.

Congratulations on reading Proust last year. I tried a few years ago, and got up to half-way through Sodom and Gomorrah before I stopped. No reason--just too long between reading sessions. I too read it in the afternoon, for better concentration. I do want to complete it, but at this point I will have to start at the beginning once again.

Alamut and Remains of the Day are two of my favorite books, and Raymond Carver a favorite writer, even though I am not typically a short story fan.

Welcome to Club Read.

>31 dchaikin: Thank you. :)

>32 arubabookwoman: Thanks for the welcome! I had my doubts that I would be able to get through the Proust at the beginning - Swann's Way was a struggle pretty much the whole way - but sticking pretty closely to the 11-pages-a-day plan worked for me. Some days I looked forward to it and read more, some days I dreaded it and counted every page, but it did become a habit. I'm not typically a short story fan either, and have always been skeptical when people said, "You just haven't read the right short stories yet," but maybe there's something to that after my experience with Carver!

> 5. I am new to the group. What does 'placing your star' mean?

>34 pmarshall: At the top of each thread there is a spot to "star this topic". If you do that, the starred threads will show up on the home page. It helps you find the people you know you want to follow. In the group, in this instance Club Read, you can quickly see the threads you are most interested in.

I will never finish a book!

Okay, that's not true; I'll probably finish a book tomorrow or the next day. But I am in that spot where I feel like I'm not getting close to moving on to anything different. I'm firmly at the halfway point in Anna Karenina, I have several more days to go with my audio book of Catherine the Great, and I'm about 3/4 of the way through Code Name Verity. Oh, and I am also nearly halfway through The Book of Disquiet, which I am absolutely loving and therefore really don't want to rush through. But I can't deny I'm feeling a little twitchy about not finishing anything for nearly a week.

And then you'll finish them all in one evening, and have reviews making you twitchy instead!

>36 ursula: I certainly know this feeling (>37 RidgewayGirl: and this one too.) Actually, i can specifically relate to being half way through Anna Karinina. Sometimes it's hard to just enjoy what you are reading.

I loved Anna Karenina, but found I had to read that one exclusively. It wasn't one to compete with anything else.

I am pretty much a one book at a time reader, Tolstoy or Dick Francis. My brain can handle more than one book at the same time but my mind doesn't like it. Does that make sense?

>37 RidgewayGirl: I know! That's the worst thing about finishing multiple books at one time, then I have more than one review in the queue immediately.

>38 dchaikin: I've tipped over into the beyond-halfway-point, which is good for me mentally since I quit somewhere back there last time.

>39 NanaCC: I am kind of the opposite - if I'm reading something involved, I really need to have something else on tap as well so I can switch off. If I felt like reading but Anna Karenina was my only option, I would probably stop reading for a while. :) I can definitely say I'm enjoying it this time much more than I did on my last try, though.

>40 pmarshall: I think I understand what you mean! My mind doesn't like it if the books are too similar, so I try to make sure they're from different time periods, fiction and non-fiction, etc.

Finished Code Name Verity tonight. It did not work for me at all. Everyone else seems to love it, so I'm probably just crazy.

Code Name Verity : It's a book that's hard to say much about because there are certain plot points it's better to go in not knowing. So, I'll just say it's made up of: female pilot, female intelligence operative, Gestapo interrogations, Peter Pan references (endless), Admiral Nelson's supposed last words (endless), the French Resistance, interludes of movie-style action.

I didn't believe any of it. None. The only way this entire thing even begins to work is if you believe that Verity, our captured operative, is being held by Colonel Klink and the rest of the crew from Hogan's Heroes. (That's a reference for people of a certain age, who are not the target demographic of this book.)

I do have one reading plan for this year:



My husband and I are going to read Infinite Jest together. We're not starting quite yet (I need to finish Anna Karenina first!), but we found this post on how to read Infinite Jest, and one of the things it suggests is brushing up on your Hamlet. I was originally planning to re-read the play, but with the timing, we've decided to just watch Kenneth Branagh's movie adaptation instead. Close enough, since it's unabridged. We're breaking up the four-hour running time into chunks, though, and so we watched the first hour last night.

I stalled out after 600 pages of Infinite Jest, but there are moments of brilliance, and the beginning chapter is amazing. There was an attempt a few years ago to have a group read of the thing, but even the person who got it up and running became discouraged partway through. I'd like to finish it someday and I hope you can read all of it and lend encouragement to those of us who have never managed to do so.

Awesome that you are attacking IJ. Take your time and read it slowly and I think you might enjoy more (not that i know your reading habits enough to really give any advice). It took me three months and i loved it.

>45 RidgewayGirl: I am hoping that the fact that we are doing this together, and the fact that I have done a longer reading project, will help. I know that there is a world of difference between Infinite Jest and In Search of Lost Time, but it's more just the discipline of reading in shorter bursts even if I am not always enjoying it will hopefully serve me well here. Those aren't the most encouraging tales of tackling the book, but it's about what I expected! I tried it before myself, but I don't think I made it more than 50 pages in.

>46 dchaikin: I have learned to read more slowly over the years where it's required and I think it's made a difference in my ability to get through some things (and often, to appreciate them) that I never would have completed in the past. I am expecting this will take us months as well.

> 47. I assume you will be reading other books at the same time. Will they be influenced by Infinite Jest, e.g., light airy comedy, romance, mystery, history or more similar subjects, drug addiction, relationships, Quebec separatism?

> 45. You were more than halfway through, what kept you going for that long, was it hard to stop? My DNF (did not finish) don't usually get to page 50.

I have read the first chapter of Infinite Jest three times, but never thought of going any further - one day perhaps

Good luck with your reading project.

>48 pmarshall: I will, of course, be reading other things at the same time. I don't really plan or tailor my reading, so I'm not sure what I'll be reading along with it. I'll probably try to avoid any other involved, postmodern novels, but that's about it. While I was reading Proust, I mostly read things that were different, but it's hard to avoid books set in France or in the same time period (or both!) for a whole year. In any event, I didn't try too hard and in fact ended up near the end of the year reading the last volume of Proust, which takes place around World War I, at the same time as Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, which is partially about her time in France as a WWI nurse. We'll see what happenstance brings with Infinite Jest.

>49 baswood: I've started it before, but remember almost nothing about it. Tennis, that's all. It's going to be an adventure!

I used to have a copy of Infinite Jest, and for the life of me I cannot find it. I would like to read it — or at least make an attempt!

>51 Poquette: It doesn't seem the kind of thing that could get lost very easily - it's the size of a small dog! :)

>52 ursula: I know! It may still be packed away from my recent move. There are still a few cartons . . . But it was not with my books per se which were packed separately. It is a puzzle.

>53 Poquette: Well, I certainly understand the effect moves can have on knowing where things are!

Today I finished listening to Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. Very interesting. I liked that it was definitely what the subtitle promised, meaning that although it of course covered the events in Russia and the rest of Europe, the focus was on Catherine as a person. She was an ambitious ruler, but she was also an unhappy wife and a woman who could be at least as vivacious and childlike as she could be unrelenting and practical.

Still poking along ... nearing the end of The Book of Disquiet, which I'm enjoying very much. Also getting close-ish to finishing Anna Karenina - I'm about 150 pages from the end of that one.

Had an almost reading-free day on Tuesday, since my daughter came up to visit. We had lunch at an Indian buffet (good choice since it gives her lots of vegetarian options), and did some cooking together for dinner. A cooking session is one of the gifts we'd given her brother for Christmas, and she said she was a little jealous because she felt like she could use some pointers as well, so that was her night. She doesn't go back to her school (she's in college in New York) for another 10 days, so we'll be able to visit again before she goes.

My laptop's battery decided to just completely give up (it's a brand-new laptop), so for the moment I can't use the computer without the power cord, and they're sending a box so I can ship the computer back to them for repairs. I'd think they could just send out a new battery, but they want to make sure it isn't the connectors or some other problem. So I'll shortly be without laptop entirely for a week or so.

Finished my 4th book of the year last night, Station Eleven. It's a pretty solid book. I liked that although the focus wasn't on the time before the pandemic, the scenes she chose to include of those days felt very real. One of the characters holes up in an upper-story apartment, and it reminded me of the real-life story of the guy who was in a data center during Hurricane Katrina and was providing updates on what he was seeing and hearing. I had a big problem with one aspect of the story, as far as believability goes, but I talked it out with my husband and managed to bring it into the realm of probability so I can't really say that ultimately detracted. The main issue for me was that some of the characters weren't that compelling, and so the narrative dragged in a few places. But overall it was entertaining and definitely worth reading.

And now, here's a closeup of part of a drawing I did earlier in the week.

>56 ursula:

Hm... you may have convinced me to give the book a chance. The story is right up my alley but the author's explanations in various interviews that "it is not like other books, it is a literary novel" kinda put me off. Genre literature is literary as well - anyone that makes a point that they are not genre authors is really pissing me off...

>44 ursula: Interesting about the Hamlet link. The Shakespeare group I am in is reading it this winter. Infinite Jest is on the TBR, so maybe I will be spurred on to read it finally.

Interesting following your reading of Anna Karenina. It is one of those books I have to read chunks as big as time will allow and then pick up again as soon as I can.

>57 AnnieMod: I saw something go by where Mandel said she didn't want to write a horror novel, but I took that to mean more that she didn't want to focus on the scary aspects of the post-flu world. I believe that she could have said other things regarding genre vs. literary that would be heartily annoying, though. It is an all-too-common sentiment.

>58 SassyLassy: Yeah, I had no idea about there being any connection to Hamlet. It does seem like just after reading that would be a good time for you to hop on to Infinite Jest!

As for Anna Karenina, I have done the opposite, reading it in small chunks consistently. Yesterday included too many pages about some district election and the intrigues therein and where everyone stood on the political issues and blah blah blah. I definitely wasn't going to quit in the middle of it or I'd never want to pick it up again, but on the other hand, I wasn't anxious to read much more once I got through that!

Book number 5: The Book of Disquiet. It's on the 1001 list, and it's got an interesting origin story. Pessoa wrote it in bits and pieces, on scraps of paper, over years. It is the diary of sorts of one of his alter egos, Bernardo Soares, who lives and works in places very similar to Pessoa. The book wasn't published in his lifetime, but instead after his death people collected the scraps, assembled them in the order they felt made sense, and published them. Later, some Pessoa scholars came through, rearranged them and published them again in a new order.

No section in the book is more than a few pages long. Some are only a sentence. Soares is an isolated, depressed, contemplative man who is convinced he'll never amount to much. The book is best read as a sort of devotional, I think (or anti-devotional, maybe) - a few pages a day, or opening to a random page and reading the part you're faced with. Under the circumstances of its existence, it can hardly matter if you don't read it in order.

The Portuguese have a word, saudade, which is roughly nostalgia, but really deeper and more profound than that. It implies a sense of loss that goes beyond simple nostalgia - it's possible to feel it for things that aren't gone yet, simply because you know that they will be. Pessoa's writing is full of saudade. He is nostalgic for the world of his dreams, which has never existed and never will. He is nostalgic for the sunset he is watching, because although there will be others, there will never be this one again. He is nostalgic for the childhood he didn't have.

Beautiful, but not to be rushed through. This mind is not one to spend too much time inside.

>60 ursula: Interesting review. I don't think I've ever read a book that could be described that way. I'll put it on the list of books to get to off of the 1001 books list. Thanks for the description of "saudade".

Lovely review of The book of Disquiet

>61 japaul22: Thanks! It's not an easily-describable book, I don't think. The fragments are numbered according to how they're arranged in this book, and also show their numerical place in the previous edition that was published, and they could not be more different. That's why I don't think it necessarily matters how you read it.

I have a Portuguese friend I met while we were living in Belgium, and she had explained saudade to me. When I started reading this, I immediately recognized places where it could apply.

>62 baswood: Thank you!

I've started Station Eleven myself and I'm finding it hard to put down.

>64 RidgewayGirl: I had that experience for about the first third or maybe half, and then it hit a bit of a lull for me. But there were only a couple of spots where it felt draggy for me, and they didn't last over-long. Looking forward to your thoughts about it!

Finished a few more while I was computer-less, although I am by no means ready to review them all yet.

I'm Not Scared by Niccolò Ammaniti is on the 1001 Books list. It's told by a nine-year-old Italian boy, Michele, who lives in a tiny establishment (it can't even be called a village because it's only a row of 5 houses) called Acqua Traverso. One day while he and his group of friends are out biking and exploring the surrounding areas on their own, they discover an abandoned house and Michele makes a further discovery of his own in the house - a boy's body in a hidden area. Michele doesn't tell his friends about it, but he can't stop thinking about it either - is the boy dead or alive? How did he get there? Should Michele tell anyone about it, and if so, who?

It's a short book (only 200 pages in hardcover) but there is a lot of story packed into it. The beginning is a taste of what you'll get from the reading experience: you're dropped into a vivid scene of friends racing in the heat of the day during one of the hottest summers in memory. Michele wants to win, but he is also supposed to look after his younger sister, who seems to always need something from him at inopportune moments. The narration really captures the flavor of being young; thinking you understand things but still open to magical explanations, the first forays into adult decisions and the betrayals and compromises those entail.

>56 ursula: i'm intrigued by your drawing.

Two curious 1001 books. I'm Not Scared has some appeal, The Book of Disqiuet sounds difficult. But seems like they have given you some interesting reading.

>66 ursula: Very nice review! I found this book enchanting when I read it several years ago. I advise against the movie, however. I can't remember the details, but the book's ending is somewhat ambiguous? I think the movie provided a specific ending and ruined the book for me. :/

>67 dchaikin: Thanks! I'll post an overall view sometime soon.

I think I'm Not Scared is a book for anyone, really. The Book of Disquiet probably isn't. ;)

>68 ELiz_M: That's a shame about the movie! I noticed that there was one and was considering tracking it down. The ending of the book is definitely ambiguous, which is one of the things I really enjoyed about it. I guess movies are less likely to go that direction, though.

I reviewed Station Eleven and then realized that I'd only given the positives but rated it 4 stars for probably inscrutable reasons based on what I said. Basically, there were a couple of places that I got a little bored and wanted things to get moving again already, and as I mentioned earlier in this thread, there was one plot point that didn't make a whole lot of sense at first glance, but I can live with it. Nevertheless, those are the things that made it less than perfect for me.

I haven't quite finished anything new yet, although I'm close to finishing just about everything. However, I do have news ... more on that in a minute.

I don't have another picture of the drawing above to add, but I have this one of a piece I just added to my shop:



Sometimes I leave them with ink, sometimes I add colored pencil. This is one of the latter.

Anyway, about the news: we're going to be moving again! Goodbye to this horrible limbo life in a horrible part of California! I've known about it since ... November? ... but it is just now finally, finally official. My husband is taking a year-long position with the University of Padova. His office will actually be in Vicenza, but I am pretty sure we're going to be living in Padova and he'll do the commute.

>71 ursula:. Another move! This sounds very exciting.. Have you lived in Italy before?

>72 NanaCC: Yes, it is definitely exciting news. I haven't lived in Italy before - I'd never even been out of the US until 2011. But while we were living in Belgium in 2013, we visited Italy twice, for a total of 3 weeks. My husband was attending conferences/working and I was out sightseeing by myself. One of those weeks was in Naples, but the others were in Padova.

As is to be expected when I seem to spend forever in the middle of all the books I'm reading, I've finished 3 within 24 hours. I'll be posting actual reviews later, but for now, a few thoughts.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf was the first one - I didn't know that Woolf had a sense of humor. I've previously read Mrs. Dalloway, which I loved, and Jacob's Room, which I loathed and made it through by sheer determination. Anyway, Orlando was really entertaining me for about 2/3 of it or so and then it spun out into weirdness in a way I didn't enjoy much, but ultimately I would say it was a good one. 4 stars.

A Pleasure and a Calling by Phil Hogan. I saw something linked somewhere about this one being from the perspective of the "bad guy," so I put it on hold at the library. It's pretty good at the unreliable narrator thing (the main character is an estate agent keeps all the keys from houses he sells and lets himself in whenever he wants to snoop into people's lives). I think though that the limitations of an unreliable narrator are also apparent here - specifically that it's difficult to walk a line about how unreliable he really is. He probably has to tell you the truth here and there or let you see it somehow, otherwise it's hard to know what's really happening. 3 stars (but the other reviews so far seem to be in the 4 star range, so make of that what you will).

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley, audio. Listened to mostly while running. It's an older (1994) science book, so some of it was kind of frustrating in terms of talk about "current research" or things that people were hoping to discover that have long since been discovered, but that would probably bother other people more than me since I don't keep up with or read a whole lot about science. Interesting examples and explanations from the animal kingdom as well as the human world for why sex is better than asexual reproduction in some species, why certain preferences in a mate might exist, and why the sexes are different. Sort of distasteful in its dismissiveness of the social sciences and truly cringeworthy in a harangue at the end about political correctness and how it will undoubtedly stifle science, but overall I feel like I got a decent amount out of the book. 3 stars.

Also, I realize I never said anything about All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which I finished last week. I liked it less than other people seem to, mostly because the first 1/3 bored me absolutely to tears and because the writing seemed so precious and studied that while I was bored, it was all I could focus on, which made me want to slap the author. But it did eventually get good and was then a real page-turner. 3 1/2 stars.

I had the same reaction to Orlando when I read it a long time ago.

What does your husband teach? I'm most envious of your recent interlude in Belgium, and I'm sure Italy will be wonderful! I feel very tied to my own campus for my contract work, but that is clearly not the case for your family.

>76 ipsoivan: Well, he hasn't/won't teach in these positions. He teaches when he has to (like the past 6 months in California), but it's not his ideal job. He's got a PhD in Mathematics, and these are research positions. He's still trying to establish himself; he just got his PhD in 2011. What do you do?

>75 baswood: That's reassuring; I kind of wondered if it was just me when things started really spiraling into (more) strangeness.

Okay, it's time to do some January statistics!

This month, I read 11 books.
I read 6 physical books, 3 Kindle books, and listened to 2 audio books.
Books were by 11 distinct authors, 8 men and 3 women.
My reading totaled 3315 pages and 36 hours, 44 minutes of listening time.
The earliest work was from 1864 (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), and the most recent from 2015 (A Pleasure and a Calling).
My reading was 81% fiction and 19% non-fiction.
I read 5 books from the 1001 Books list.

On the non-reading front, this month I ran 61.7 km (38.3 mi).

>77 ursula: I teach academic writing. I'm at a campus where most students are either international or from immigrant families. We've got a little department that focuses on helping students develop language proficiency--sounds dull, but it's actually really fun. We create educational games, get them writing daily about what they are learning--that kind of thing. It's the kind of thing that doesn't travel well because most universities are unwilling to put the resources into these kinds of programs.

>79 ursula: You are lucky to be able to read so fast. I believe 11 books in one month would be beyond me. I think I may have read 10 books once, but there were a bunch of shorties tucked in there so it almost felt like cheating! But bravo!

>80 ipsoivan: Yeah, I think it's different. Math tends to involve a decent amount of travel, if only for conferences. Being in the US has made it a little more difficult, since so much of it has to do with meeting and working with people who can put in a good word for you.

Personally, I think your job sounds interesting, not dull at all!

>81 Poquette: Thanks! I read reasonably fast, but I haven't managed to keep a steady pace of 10 or more books a month. I'll have good months and not-so-good ones! My daughter is a faster reader than I am, by probably about 1 1/2 times. Of course, for the last few years she hasn't been able to read much for pleasure since she's in college and most of her reading is for classes.

Before my daughter headed back to college (where she is dealing with a lot of snow - she has had 1 hour of class time for one of her classes so far out of 9 hours they should have had), we went for a hike out in the redwoods near Capitola. I don't consider myself particularly attached to California, but if there were one feature I could take with me anywhere, it would probably be redwoods.



As far as books go, I'm kinda bogged down at the moment, having somehow ended up with too many nonfiction books for my liking, which meant I had to add more fiction to balance it, and now I'm reading so many books I might be caught in that paradox of reading half of what's left every time and therefore never finishing anything!

On the other hand, if I wanted to add to that, my husband and I watched the last half of Hamlet (finally), and now we're theoretically ready to start Infinite Jest. Also, we are nailing down a departure date, though I won't feel good about that until we have our tickets booked. Once that's done, I'll become a lot more disciplined about getting rid of things and figuring out what stays and what goes - having a hard deadline is the best motivational tool for me.

I finished my first book of February, Blood and Guts in High School. It was certainly a challenging read, as one can probably tell from the tags associated with the book. Actually, out of all of those, I'll be honest that "postmodernism" probably scared me the most. ;)

I don't have a lot of coherent thoughts about it just yet, but I found it interesting. Don't read it on public transportation though: if the repeated, bold, all-capital obscenities don't catch the attention of the people around you, the full-page drawings of genitalia surely will.

>83 ursula: love that picture

>85 baswood: Thanks so much! I had a few to choose from that I took on the hike, but one of the things I love about the redwoods is the way the sunlight goes through them like that.

I've finished a couple more books now, The Maltese Falcon and Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram. I'm never all that current with my reviews once the year really gets underway, so I tend to just put a few words down when I finish them and then work my way through the reviews and link them up top in the second post.

The Maltese Falcon - somehow I've managed to read 3 Dashiell Hammett books in the last couple of years (I mean, it's not a total shock, they were all on the 1001 Books list, but I rarely read books by the same author, especially close together). This was the first one that featured Sam Spade, though. I saw the movie a long time ago, but I don't remember a thing about it. What I will say, though, is that I didn't have any trouble not picturing Humphrey Bogart as Spade, because the physical description is not at all similar. But by the same token, as soon as Joel Cairo entered the novel, I knew he had to have been played by Peter Lorre, and when Gutman ("The Fat Man") arrived, I had to hit up IMDb to make sure that he was Sydney Greenstreet, which of course he was. The mystery has twists and turns and dead bodies and lots of dames, only one of whom is the client and none of whom can seem to resist Spade. Spade himself, by the way, is kind of a jerk.

Ice Ship is non-fiction, and I got it through Early Reviewers. I do love me some polar exploration, for some unknown reason. I can't swim, I have no interest in frozen tundra and many animals are always killed on these expeditions, so it seems less than obvious that it'd be a topic I keep returning to. But still, it is. This was a bound hardcover, which was nice because there are a lot of photographs. In fact, it looks more like a coffee-table book than a regular non-fiction read. That made it a little unwieldy for having so much text, but I still think it was the right choice. Anyway, the "hook" is that the book is centered around the ship rather than the crew or expedition leader of a specific journey, which means that we get to talk about Fritdjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen both, since they each took the Fram on different trips. It's a good premise, and there's a lot of interesting information along with the aforementioned photographs, but the writing is not that great. Still definitely worth checking out if you're interested in the subject matter, but be prepared to cringe sometimes.

It's too bad the writing wasn't so good in Ice Ship, that does sound like a good premise. I'm embarrassed to say I only know of the Fram from an old children's novel!

>87 mabith: The author clearly has a lot of love for his subject, but he gets tangled up in some sentences, there are some sloppy editing issues, and he sometimes writes things that sound great as long as you don't try to think about them too much. I mean, there are worse things in the world. I think I'd probably rather read the story of someone like that than someone who is completely dispassionate about their subject. But it certainly had its weaknesses. Also, there was a children's novel about the Fram? It seems like kind of a funny topic for one, but I guess at least the expeditions with that ship didn't end in mass starvation and death.

The novel wasn't about the Fram, but the kids in it are obsessed with exploration and sea travel and there's a big winter snow with a frozen lake, so they make believe they're on the Fram as part of their adventures. (It's Winter Holiday, part of the Swallows and Amazons series.)

We have a children's picture book about Franklin's doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Really beautiful illustrations, too.

>89 mabith: Sounds charming!

>90 RidgewayGirl: That's a grim one. So many people died, and Franklin's wife spent so long (and so much money) trying to find out what happened to him.

Well, now it feels official. Tickets are booked. We're leaving April 28. That means I'll miss my daughter's birthday entirely (it's the 29th). She said I can make it up to her when she comes to visit. ;)

Finished listening to Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd. I was hoping it would help me understand some of the mystique surrounding Venice. When I visited there, I thought it was interesting, and sort of pretty, but I wasn't really transported by the experience. I liked wandering the streets aimlessly (on my first day trip there, I didn't buy a map, with the idea that getting lost was kind of the point), and I liked the glimpses of actual Venetian life going on around the tourists. But I wasn't enamored of it like people seem frequently to be. So, that was my motivation in picking up this title, and I think it helped me understand some aspects of the appeal. Some of the things to consider:

- it's unlike any other city in structure. This is perhaps obvious, but it takes a while of walking around to realize what's missing - not only cars, but any form of wheeled transportation. No bikes, no skates, no scooters. The only thing you'll see are strollers (with miserable parents carrying them up and down the steps of all the bridges) and delivery people yelling "Attenzione! Attenzione!"
- canals, and what they mean to the city. I was visiting from Gent, so I knew canals. Once you live around some, the romance dissipates. They are filthy things. However, they do make for nice reflections. One point that Ackroyd makes in the book is that these reflections give Venice a dual nature, with the whole city being twin to a more ephemeral version of itself in the water.
- speaking of water and ephemeralness, the fact that Venice shouldn't exist at all, and seems to always have someone panicking with fear that it will cease to exist. The city always seems to balancing on the very edge of destruction, but somehow perseveres. It's a very romantic idea.
- community. Venice is quite a lot like a prison or a college dormitory - everyone lives close together, everyone has to see each other on a personal level (no getting into your anonymous car and driving to your anonymous supermarket), the houses face onto campi through which everyone will pass in the course of a day. Do your neighbors know your business? You bet.
- and conversely, secrecy. The obvious example is Carnival, giving people a period of relief from prying eyes. Even if people could tell who you were under your mask, it was the early version of "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." But even more than that, Venice has had a history of secrecy and subterfuge. Abroad, their diplomats were infamous observers and informers. At home, there were certain mailboxes throughout the city which could be used to anonymously inform on your neighbors. The streets (narrow and full of dead ends) can be considered a physical manifestation of the love of secrecy. The system of addresses is such that giving one to even a life-long Venetian is likely to result in a confused shake of the head.
- it's a place of sometimes frustrating traditionalism. In The City of Falling Angels, John Berendt talks about the rebuilding of the Fenice Opera House and how the rallying cry was "com'era, dov'era", which means "as it was, where it was." Well, that's been the case with everything for centuries upon centuries. If a building collapses, it's built in exactly the same form in the same place, often using as many of the same bricks and stones as they can salvage. This creates a timeless city, or perhaps one suspended in time.

There's more, including the history and mythology of the city's founding, the character of the Venetian people, the pilfered saints' relics all over the city, the role of art in society, and why Venice was never a literary hotbed (for natives; obviously plenty of foreigners wrote about Venice). A lot of it was really fascinating, but the way the book is structured (around ideas, rather than chronology) leads to repetition and made me feel like I wasn't intended to read it straight through. Also, sometimes Ackroyd lets his literary self have a bit too much free rein and says things that would sound pretty in a novel but seem out of place and overblown in nonfiction.

To finish, a couple of photos from Venice:



Late afternoon in Canareggio, at the Campo San Geremia.



Sunset in November from the Piazzetta, looking at San Giorgio Maggiore.

Really interesting review of Ackroyd's Venice: Pure City. I am one of those people in thrall to Venice. It is one of those cities of the imagination as much as a reality. I was there once so long ago that it might as well have happened to someone else! But still . . .

Despite its flaws, I am sure I would enjoy this book. Onto my wish list! Thanks for your review.

>94 Poquette: I guess I'd call it more "thoughts" than a review, but thank you for the compliment! I think there is a lot to enjoy about the book, and maybe the repetition wouldn't be as annoying if you're actually reading it. I was listening to the audio book while running, so a completely captive audience, which gave me a lot of time to be thinking, "You already told me that!"

As for Venice itself, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to see how my feelings and opinions change (or don't) while I'm living so close to it for a year. I'm sure I'll be seeing plenty of the city.

You'll have such a fantastic time in Italy! We're spending our Spring holiday outside of Arezzo and I am already ready to be there.

>96 RidgewayGirl: Oh, definitely. I enjoyed it a lot the times we were there before, although I admit to being a little sad that we will be in Northern Italy. If we had been moving to Naples, my husband might have a hard time getting me to leave again.

I've been on a "city" kick, I guess. I have both Invisible Cities and A Tale of Two Cities going, and I replaced Venice: Pure City with City of Lies. Funny how these things work out sometimes.

Infinite Jest update: Husband and I are on page 78, which is slightly behind our schedule, but yesterday was a bit of a nightmare day for non-book-related reasons and the day before had a not-entirely-unexpected but caught-me-by-surprise-at-that-particular-moment 8-page endnote that sort of dragged that segment out. Enjoying it reasonably well, although as confused as I imagined I would be at this point.

>98 ursula: LOL on all those cities. Have you read The City and the City?

>99 FlorenceArt: Ridiculous, isn't it?! And I haven't read that one, it's not my usual sort of thing, but it kind of feels like I should considering the circumstances!

>98 ursula: I've been on a "city" kick, I guess.

That happened to me a couple of years ago! It seemed like every other book I read had "city" in the title! That kick was followed by "dreams"! ;-)

>101 Poquette: It was just so strange! I was meandering along, adding books at random to my pile of what I was reading ... and suddenly realized they looked ridiculous together! I can't remember something like that happening to me before but I'll be on the alert for dreams now! ;)

I'm taking one "city" book off the pile: I finished Invisible Cities. I gave it 5 stars because I can't really come up with a single complaint about it. One might complain that there's no storyline, which is true, but that didn't bother me. There were many really wonderful turns of phrase and observations about people, cities, and life - it took me a long time to get through the book partially because I kept having to stop and copy down quotes.

So glad you enjoyed Invisible Cities. It was a 5-star read for me as well, and one that I went back to page one and read it again! So cool!

>104 Poquette: I'm going to be looking out for a copy of it in Italian and hoping I'll be able to read it within the next year with some level of understanding!

>105 ursula: Now that is ambitious! Something to envy . . .

Well, hopefully after a year of immersion, I'll have something to show for it. :)

All the best in that endeavor!

I added Invisible Cities to my wishlist after seeing it mentioned several times here and elsewhere. There is also a BD (graphic novel) inspired by it, which I may or may not have read, I'm not sure now. Apparently the English title is The Invisible Frontier.

ETA: oops, I got it completely wrong, the BD I was thinking of is called Les cités obscures and I doubt it has anything to do with Calvino.

>108 Poquette: Thanks!

>109 FlorenceArt: Who knows, that graphic novel could have been inspired by Invisible Cities! I hope you enjoy the Calvino when you get around to it.

The reading is going slowly lately, due to a number of factors.

1. Infinite Jest. I mean, it's going fine, we're sticking to our 14-pages-a-day schedule, but that pretty much occupies the whole of my usual afternoon reading time.
2. Learning Italian. I spend a lot of what used to be reading hours doing online lessons, audio lessons, watching Italian news, reading (trying to read, really) Italian newspapers, having children's books read to me on YouTube, etc.
3. Hiking. We've been going once a week for a hike with the dog. Turns out, our dog had gotten a little heavier than we realized. It doesn't matter for the trip, because there are only size limits on the kennel, not weight requirements, and she's in no danger there (she's in the "intermediate" size), but we are sorry to have let her put on weight and want her in the best health possible by the time we go, so we've cut back on her food and are giving her a lot more exercise to slim her down.

Here's a photo of my husband and the dog (and the scenery!) from our hike two weeks ago:

Enjoyed your thoughts on Venice; Pure City. Venice is one of my favourite cities, I have been three times and the best time was when I spent a week there in November. Venice in the mist and fog is very atmospheric.

I probably won't read the Ackroyd book because he is an author I can't seem to get along with.

>112 baswood: And the city is not so full of tourists in November. (Not that it's ever completely empty of them, of course....) I'd like to stay overnight there sometime, I think. We've always been limited by having to catch the last train back to Padova, and that leaves at 9 pm. At least when we were there in November, it had been dark for a while by then. I did like seeing the city at night.

I can see not getting along with Ackroyd. This is the second one I've read by him, the first being Hawksmoor. I think I found both "okay," so I'm not planning to seek out more by him.

Good to see you back after your computer issues! I can certainly relate, as both my husband and I have struggled through some serious ones in the last few months.

Yesterday I finished The Two Worlds of Marcel Proust. Although it started strong, it got pretty dry, and that's why it took me nearly a month to get through its 250-ish pages. The "two worlds" of the title are the intellectual and the emotional - the author says that we have three aspects to personality (the active is the third, but Proust wasn't very drawn in this direction), and these two were the ones dominating Proust. The book covers Proust's life, his works before In Search of Lost Time, and of course that work. It was interesting to read about how he was perceived in society (much like the narrator Marcel - solicitous to the point of arousing suspicions about his sincerity, anxious to be liked) and what people thought about his talent (it varied wildly).

I most enjoyed the excerpts from his letters, where he described the structure and plans he had for In Search of Lost Time, along with his doubts about whether or not he would be able to achieve it. One downside: this book was published in 1946 and as a result, the views on homosexuality are not the most evolved when expressed, and the issue seems to be skirted as much as possible. That plus the dryness of much of the writing really made it drag, but maybe it would have been more enjoyable and interesting to me if it weren't the first thing I read about Proust. Worth the ten cents I paid for it.

A couple of interesting quotes: "What is more individual to Proust, and what is perhaps the chief reason why he is at first hard to read, is that he sees events, not as external, objective and successive, but as internal images and echoes which come and go and come back again."

"Prerequisite to the enjoyment of Proust is a preference for the overtones of experience to experience itself. Proust writes for introverts." (Although I'd quibble with that last part. This extrovert enjoyed reading Proust quite a bit.)

The Two Worlds of Marcel Proust sounds appealing, even if maybe a bit obscure. I like the lines you quote.

And great job keeping IJ going. Are you enjoying it?

>115 dchaikin: It might have just been a bad time to be reading it for me, as well. I got something out of it, I just ended up stretching it out over a long period of time and not always wanting to pick it up. (Occasionally I felt that way about Proust himself, so ...) :)

As for IJ, I am mostly enjoying it. I think it would be a much different experience if my husband and I weren't reading together. It's nice to have someone else who catches references you don't, or can help flip back and find where something was mentioned before, or who has different theories about things. DFW throws in some hilarious lines or terrific thoughts/quotes often enough that I want to keep going even if I have nearly zero idea what's really going on at this point (about 185 pages in).

Strangely, when I finally finished In Search of Lost Time (I read it over the course of a year several years ago, with other books mixed in), I had no urge to read about Proust. But your review was intriguing.

>116 ursula: When I finished Infinite Jest, I still had no idea what was going on, mostly. But that's a pretty normal state for me, so maybe it won't be the case for you :-)

>117 rebeccanyc: When I finished it, I immediately wanted to read about Proust. I had only had minor glimpses into anything about him, by way of some comments by André Gide about Sodom and Gomorrah, vague comments about him being a shut-in, and the post-mortem photograph taken by Man Ray. But at the same time, I questioned the wisdom of spending a year reading his books and then jumping right into biography or literary criticism. So I split the difference by waiting a month or so to read anything.

>118 FlorenceArt: I have to wonder if we'll end up feeling the same. Yesterday, my husband said he felt like threads were starting to converge across the various stories, but he had to admit I was right when I said, "You said the same thing two days ago!" It's got this overwhelming feeling that things are going to come together, but I'm not sure it's going to happen for a while. I guess that I mostly feel like DFW knows where he's going, so I'm just following along and waiting to see.

Time for February stats ...

This month, I read 8 books.
I read 5 physical books, 1 Kindle book, and listened to 2 audio books.
Books were by 8 distinct authors, 6 men and 2 women.
My reading totaled 1476 pages and 23 hours, 19 minutes of listening time.
The earliest work was from 1859 (A Tale of Two Cities), and the most recent from 2015 (Ice Ship).
My reading was 50% fiction and 50% non-fiction.
I read 4 books from the 1001 Books list.

On the non-reading front, this month I ran 50.75 km (31.53 mi).

So, everything was a little less this month - number of books, number of pages, running distance. It was a short month, and a variety of other circumstances interfered (see >111 ursula:).

Not too shabby overall, though.

Some thoughts about my last audio book, City of Lies by Ramita Navai. It's non-fiction about Tehran, and the premise is that in order to survive in Tehran, you must lie. So it follows the stories of various people in the city who are living varying types and degrees of lies. A woman who got out of a bad marriage becomes a prostitute and then stars in amateur porn movies. A young man whose parents were put to death is faced with the judge who sentenced them. A gay youth in the militia tries to keep his orientation under wraps. An expat returns to Iran as a member of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq to make an assassination attempt on a former police chief.

The former Iran, of parties, drinking, and unveiled women, is a constant presence. Even if the main characters themselves don't remember those days, their parents do. Navai describes people getting away with what they can in present-day Iran, even if the stakes are high - lashes, imprisonment, or both, are the punishment for wearing the hijab incorrectly, being made up, drinking, wearing the wrong clothes. Death is of course a possibility for many crimes. The stories are gripping and involving, but I ran into a problem when I wanted to look up more information on one of the stories: I read in a review that Navai has said that most of the characters are composites, and many originate from stories she heard second- or even third-hand. I get that it's important to protect one's sources, and that changing names and details to protect people happens all the time in journalism (although it did get me to thinking about exactly how that's accomplished to both provide adequate protection and to maintain the journalistic integrity of the story), but this seems to go far beyond that. If I hear a story from a friend about something their cousin told them, and then I add that story onto another similar but not quite the same story, and maybe mix in some other details from somewhere else, is that still non-fiction?

I don't really think so, and that's a shame, because the book would have had a lot of impact. As it is, I just kept thinking of what would happen to any character profile if you compile all the sensational details of a cross-section of people's lives and turn them into one story. It would seem almost too much to believe, right? And it actually would be. I guess I should have expected it from a book with this title.

>121 ursula: Still an interesting subject. I wonder about people in Tehran as I was there in the mid 70's as a tourist and I think about the people I met and how they would have had to adapt to life under a new regime. At the time I was there it seemed like coca cola land, with some people getting extraordinary wealthy under the Shah and this wealth was trickling down to many areas of the city.

>122 baswood: Definitely an interesting subject. I can only imagine how difficult it was for those people of the 70s to adapt to the new regime. The change made for two completely different worlds.

It's looking like it might rain here today, so I'm posting something a little brighter and sunnier.

My participation in threads other than my own in this group is almost non-existent, I know. I keep up on pretty much all of them, though. I just have this quirk of not reading reviews of books I think I might read, so it doesn't leave me a lot of things to comment on. But I am there, visiting quietly. I promise.

A couple of days ago, I finished A Tale of Two Cities. On my 1001 Books thread, I said "It was the best of books, it was the worst of books ... which averages out to it being an okay book." I don't know that I can improve upon that, but generally I would say maybe this wasn't the time for me to be reading it because I had a hard time remembering who was who or what was going on, and I had a hard time caring. I did not realize (spoiler alert, if such a thing is possible) that the much-referred-to-in-many-outside-contexts Madame Defarge was such an awful person. So that was surprising to me. I've now discharged my new goal (started last year) of reading one Dickens book per year.

I've been falling behind on writing reviews (along with many other things). Today I finished The Italians by John Hooper. It's a new non-fiction book about, you guessed it, Italy and its inhabitants. The author is a foreign correspondent (he's British), but he's been living in Rome for something like twenty years, so he has a kind of outsider's-insider view. He takes on expected things like the historical reasons for the divide between the North and the South of the country, corruption in politics, the mafia, the continued influence of Catholicism. He also discusses a number of other topics, like the role of traditionalism and conventionality (why do pretty much all the restaurants in Rome serve gnocchi on Thursdays - and only on Thursdays?), Italian family ties and whether they weaken the loyalty to laws and government, and exactly why appearances are so important and scrutinized so closely.

One of the most interesting bits to me was his discussion of the terms furbo and fesso. Although they might seem at the beginning to be in direct opposition with each other, furbo being defined as smart, clever, cunning, and fesso as stupid, foolish, it turns out their definitions in society aren't so clearly delineated. Being furbo means you take advantage of every opportunity you see; it's not a compliment ... unless the speaker means it as one. If you fare il furbo, you're jumping the line. It's also the word used in the phrase equivalent to "don't get smart with me!" But people can also use it with a wink of approval in the way you dodged a regulation or got away with something. And fesso isn't simply stupid in the sense of being dull. It's about not taking something that's on offer, whether or not it's the "right" thing to do. Hooper says you're considered fesso if you pay full fare on the train.

I imagine if you've wondered about some of the stereotypes about Italy, or read a news story and wondered how that could possibly happen (maybe specifically articles about Silvio Berlusconi and how it would be possible for someone always being charged with something to be elected as prime minister multiple times), you'll enjoy this book. It's not terribly in depth, but it does cover a wide range of topics and seems to give a good overview. In addition, I learned some proverbs and sayings, and got a good list of other books on Italy that I'll be reading soon hopefully.

I listened to an interview of John Hooper and he mentioned the gnocchi only on Thursdays, which I filed away in my brain to use as needed. The book sounds interesting.

There is never a better dressed man in the room than Silvio Berlusconi. Italy is a fascinating country and the Hooper book sounds like good fun.

>126 RidgewayGirl: It is an interesting book. Another aspect I enjoyed learning more about is the Italian justice system. It was in the spotlight a lot during the Amanda Knox thing (which of course is still not technically over), and Hooper explained where a lot of the problems come in. And boy, are there a lot of problems.

>127 baswood: One of the interesting sayings I picked up in the book was "L'unico metodo infallibile per conoscere il prossimo è giudicarlo dalle apparenze." That translates to "The only foolproof way to know the man next to you is to judge by his appearance." The book was indeed good fun, and an excellent starting point for my reading.

I finished The Castle of Otranto. Everything including the kitchen sink is thrown into that one. I enjoyed it, actually, for all its overwrought-ness.

It's been a slow reading month so far, but hopefully it will pick up steam as we go on.

>129 ursula:

Ursula, how do you paste in a book cover? Are there directions somewhere?

>130 pmarshall: There are probably directions somewhere ... but on the book page, I right-click the cover image and choose "copy image location." Then in the post, I type <img src="pastedURL"> (where "pastedURL" is what I copied on the other page).

So, <img src="https://pics.librarything.com/picsizes/87/e0/87e02b0a96e17eb597557396767434f414f4141.jpg"> yields this:

>131 ursula:
I can't make it work. I have a Mac with different commands. I will keep trying. Thanks.

Penny, I have a Mac too. I do what Ursula says, but when I right click on the picture of the cover I select Copy Image Address. The I do Command V to paste it into the spot where Ursula has pastedURL.

>131 ursula:, >133 NanaCC:
I did it. I will have brighter pages from now on. Thanks for your help.

We took the dog to the beach today. She had a really great time. We all had a great time, really, although my husband twisted his knee and ended up limping a bit. But luckily it wasn't too bad and he was able to keep walking on it. It was a beautiful day, which is definitely not guaranteed at this time of year.

It may be nearly impossible to believe, but I actually finished a book last night, Untouchable. It's on the 1001 Books list, and is about Bakha, a young latrine-cleaner in India. He is a member of the lowest caste as a result of being born into his job. The story takes place during a single day in his life. In the morning, an incident occurs where a man in the street comes into contact with Bakha, and there is much fallout from that. Bakha has some good moments, some bad moments, and some contemplative moments about himself, his religion and his country. The book is short, only 167 pages, but after about the first 80 I had a hard time getting through it. It also got sort of excessively preachy at the end. I get that it's an important book, and I don't doubt the importance of that story, but it became a chore to read for me. I'm giving it 3 stars for its merits and the insight into Indian history.

>136 ursula: I entirely agree with you on Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. It is one of those books that they make high schoolers in India read, as part of curricula, because we need to understand the horrors of caste violence. But I don't think it's considered high literature. Possibly, famous because it spoke about something that was emerging during Anand's lifetime as a critical social problem. I, too, found it hard to read!

>137 reva8: Thanks for your comment. I was wondering if it was required reading in India ... it just sort of seemed like one of those books that might be a likely candidate! I agree that it is interesting as a book that was written in the moment instead of looking back with the benefit of hindsight. But I'm still glad to hear I'm not the only one who had a hard time with it!

>129 ursula: I read The Castle of Otranto recently as well and I completely know what you mean about the kitchen sink. I, too, enjoyed it - sit tight & hang on for the ride!

>139 Helenliz: That about describes it!

Finished my second book called The Italians, although this one was the one published earlier (1963, I believe). Written by a guy from Milan and delivering exactly what it promised, a head-to-toe portrait of the Italian people. It was somewhat pessimistic in tone (I'm not sure what the '60s were like in Italy, but from this I gather that they were prosperous but the country was still reeling a bit from the aftereffects of World War II), but really the conclusions were not much different than the ones reached by Hooper in his book.

Which I think illustrates Barzini's point that the players may change, but the game never really does in Italy. I'll comment that his imagining of future leaders to emerge sounded a lot like Silvio Berlusconi, so he was certainly on the right track.

A long quote: "This is the formula. It was good in the past and it will probably be good enough for many years to come. Take a vast, hard-working, pliable, ingenious population, worried about its daily bread, capable at times of accepting untold sacrifices, but restless and anxious for novelties. Keep the people ignorant by providing the minimum amount of schools. Keep them in want by regimenting with an iron hand or persecuting industry and trade. Keep them bewildered and insecure by the arbitrary manipulation of vaguely worded laws. See that there never are clearly defined rights and duties, but always favors from above or abuses of power. Keep the people happy with a steady rain of miserable alms, distracted with many holidays, more holidays than any other nation in Europe, feasts, the inauguration of splendidly decorated and sometimes useful public works. Spend most of the money on superfluous things, the armed forces and insensate wars in the past, and now on entertainments, public spectacles, games; spend as little as possible on improving the people's moral and physical conditions. Keep them always drunk with stirring appeals to their more primitive emotions."

>141 ursula: That brings back memories! I can picture the bright yellow cover of my mother's paperback edition of the Barzini; in fact, LT tells me I kept it. I never read it, though.

I have a copy of that Barzini from around the time of my honeymoon in Florence (2000), but haven't read it. Glad to read your review.

>142 rebeccanyc: Why did your mother have that book? I am just curious, it seems like a bit of a niche interest!

>143 dchaikin: I didn't manage to really review it, looking back at that post now. :) Things are just crazy around here. But I'd say it's definitely worth reading, if you should ever find yourself so inclined. The Hooper book touches on some of the same topics, with a slightly different slant. One of the most interesting to me (found in both books) was the perception that visitors tend to have about how happy everyone seems in Italy, and how charming tourists find it all. Let's just say there's a lot of show required to make it all look effortless.

>142 rebeccanyc: I think it was a best-seller when it came out. Here's a picture of her/my edition.



This is the 1965 paperback, so it was probably the first paperback edition, since the book was originally published in 1964.

I finished listening to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle finally. The book has bits written by Barbara Kingsolver's husband, Steven Hopp, and her daughter, Camille. The audiobook was read by the appropriate author for each section. The story of them moving their family from the local-food wasteland of Arizona to a farm in Virginia and working to eat only what they raised themselves or could buy from other local farmers and ranchers sounded really interesting, and it mostly was. The parts that were not as interesting, though I should have known going in that they would be there, were the preachy bits about genetically modified crops, the petroleum costs of transporting food, global climate change, etc. It's not like I disagree in theory with any of their viewpoints on these topics, it just felt a bit over the top to direct at the audience who has already picked up the book. Kingsolver's husband Hopp wrote and reads most of the excessively preachy bits, and it doesn't help that his voice sounds like Ben Stein delivering a lecture about the perils of not looking both ways before you cross the street.

I learned a lot about turkeys (too much in the end, as it turns out - detailed descriptions of turkey sex are not as enthralling as Kingsolver seems to think), and about making an enterprise like this work. And "work" is definitely the key word; wanting to eat in January and February means a lot of gardening, preserving and canning in the rest of the year. The book also had a funny sort of synchronicity for me since they took a vacation to Italy. (And when she said she was trying to tell people at a certain inn that they were starving and may have mixed up the words affamato and affogato, one of which she thought meant starving and the other one of which meant a poached egg -- she was sort of right. Un uovo affogato is a poached egg, but affogato on its own means "drowned." I guess she never had a caffè affogato in Italy, which is ice cream topped with espresso. Way better than a poached egg!)

>145 rebeccanyc: That's a pretty cool cover! Interesting that it was a bestseller - I mean, I guess it's not that surprising since Italy is a place people are interested in, and I have never really paid attention to/ thought about what sort of nonfiction makes it to the bestseller lists. I think I made it through the first 30 years of my life reading a minimum of nonfiction.

>147 ursula: I'm just guessing that it was a bestseller, as I was only 12 then and not paying attention to the best seller lists! And, alas, Wikipedia couldn't help me.

>148 rebeccanyc: Oh yeah, I figured it was just a guess. I was more musing on why it might have been popular.

Went to the library yesterday, and although I normally only go there to pick up inter-library loans (this library is the absolute worst one I've ever seen in my life), it did occur to me this time to check out a shelf.



I think April will probably be another month with a low total of books read.

Last night I finished Boy, Snow, Bird. I didn't like it. I read Oyeyemi's first book, The Icarus Girl, and I enjoyed it but I don't remember much about it. This one was set in the US and uses a vague connection to the Snow White fairy tale to tell a story about appearances - how (or whether) we see ourselves, how other people see us, how knowledge can change how we are perceived. The themes are actually very interesting, and some of the book lives up to that, but the rest of it is just sort of there. The female protagonist is named Boy for no apparent reason, and I found that distracting. Realizing that there was a fairy tale underpinning actually made it more difficult for me to appreciate the book, I think, because I kept looking for or expecting correlations, and there really weren't that many of them. There are a lot of mirrors, but that made sense with the themes Oyeyemi was exploring anyway; I don't think having Boy be a stepmother to a girl named Snow really added anything positive or meaningful to the story.

Time for March stats ...

This month, I read 6 books.
I read 5 physical books and listened to 1 audio book.
Books were by 6 distinct authors, 4 men and 2 women.
My reading totaled 1259 pages and 14 hours, 35 minutes of listening time.
The earliest work was from 1764 (The Castle of Otranto), and the most recent from 2015 (The Italians by John Hooper).
My reading was 50% fiction and 50% non-fiction.
I read 2 books from the 1001 Books list.

On the non-reading front, this month I ran 64.01 km (39.77 mi).

Down again from last month, on everything except running. However, I will say it's not entirely accurate since I've also read about 550 pages of Infinite Jest. But that'll be tallied up next month, so it'll all even out in the end.

>150 ursula: I was disappointed with Boy Snow Bird too, although I loved Oyeyemi's earlier Mr. Fox.

>152 rebeccanyc: Yeah, after I'd picked it up and started to feel maybe it wasn't going to work for me, I reflected that maybe the context I'd seen it mentioned in here was one of disappointment. :)

I've updated my first message to include the language-learning stuff I'm reading and listening to, since I guess it's still time spent reading/listening, and it's certainly taking away from my usual pursuits.

Although I am getting close to actually finishing two books, so that'll feel like an accomplishment at least. Pretty sure there won't be any real reviews though - something has had to be sacrificed with everything else going on, and reviews were definitely one of the first things to go.

First book finished for April: Shakespeare Saved My Life. This was kind of a random, spur-of-the-moment pick. I was at the library's website and I saw this book was the "Big Library Read" and therefore had unlimited availability as an e-book, so I went ahead and checked it out. (This is the 3rd book that's been part of the program, apparently, according to the site.

Laura Bates is a professor at a university in Indiana when she decides to start teaching Shakespeare at a supermax prison. One inmate in particular not only gains a lot from the program, but also helps Bates create a prison-specific curriculum on the plays. He is in prison for life without possibility of parole, and the book focuses about equally on the Shakespeare program and the prisoner's situation and experiences. It's clear that Bates developed a strong bond with the prisoner, Larry Newton, but she was careful not to share her personal life with him or to delve too deeply into his. She obviously finds some aspects of the criminal justice system baffling and unfair on the surface, but is pretty even-handed in how she describes them, letting the reader draw their own conclusions.

I found the book slightly better than okay, but maybe other readers who might be surprised at the idea that the unwashed masses could read and find relevance in Shakespeare on their own, without the benefit of scholars and literary criticism, might think it's revelatory. I thought it was interesting that Bates was really willing to let the prisoners inhabit the plays and interpret them in ways that would make them appealing to their prison audience - when the prisoners put on a rewritten version of Romeo & Juliet, not only is romance not the focus; Juliet doesn't even appear in their play. It was a pretty quick read, although I don't know that I'd call it "light" just because for me, I find the prison system as it stands incredibly frustrating, and this look inside did nothing to change that.

(I don't have any answers on how to make sweeping changes; it just seems pretty clear that what we're doing isn't working.)

>146 ursula: hi! I'm just catching up on your thread. Your review of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle sounds interesting. I've enjoyed Kingsolver's fiction, but I did wonder how her style might translate to non-fiction (now I know: it means detailed descriptions of turkey sex!). I too, was disappointed with Boy, Snow, Bird though like Rebecca, I enjoyed Mr Fox, which was both chilling and charming. I'm enjoying your reviews!

Shakespeare Saved My Life shows up every time I look at my library's website. I'm not sure I'll read it, but your review does make me think it's worth reading.

>156 reva8: I've only read The Poisonwood Bible, and that only recently, so I didn't really have much idea about Kingsolver. I did learn a lot about food and growing things from the book - I admit I'm a person who generally thinks things come from the grocery store and has no real sense of "seasonal." (But this is because I'm spoiled by my husband doing the shopping and he is aware for both of us.)

I'll have to pick up Mr. Fox one day. I do like her writing.

>157 RidgewayGirl: I think it is. Sometimes I felt like it veered a little bit toward "oh look, prisoners can have deep thoughts and interpret literature!" as if they were gorillas learning sign language, but I had to remind myself that far too many people probably think it is similar.

Yesterday, I finished Deadline in Athens, a mystery that is on the 1001 Books list. As the title suggests, it's set in Greece; the main character is a Greek police detective. He is refreshingly free of major character flaws - he has a wife who he doesn't always get along with, but there's no major dysfunction there, he has a close relationship with his adult daughter (though he's not a fan of her boyfriend), he drinks too much on rare occasions, but it's not a constant thing, etc. This book has also been translated as The Late Night News and that's because the main story involves a reporter being killed while investigating the first murders that occur in the book, of two Albanians. It turns out to be a twisty, involved story that leads down some unexpected streets before becoming clear.

I liked it, and it was about exactly what I needed right now, when my ability to concentrate is becoming severely compromised. I learned some interesting tangential things about Greece as well - they have the late night news, which tends not to have much of an audience, and the 9 o'clock news, which most people see before having dinner. So, much like here, but it points out the difference in culture since our "dinner-time" news is at 6! Also, Athens has some serious gridlock. The traffic was nearly another character.

Finished Ciao, America!, which is a nonfiction book about an Italian living in Georgetown for a year. It's a little dated, unavoidably, because it was originally published in 1995. He talks about communicating through his numerical email address (shout out to Compuserve!), just as an example. Those parts weren't really the worst things about the book, though. The worst parts are the cringeworthy comments about race. I understand that particularly 20 years ago, Italy wasn't a terribly racially diverse society (and they continue to have serious problems with racism today), so I can totally understand that the author would comment on the ethnic makeup of Washington DC. But his comments about how "black Americans ... adopt expressions that are grammatically questionable, not to mention physically alarming, such as 'to hit someone upside the head.'", and his story about how he amused himself by asking the black gas station to repeat himself even after he'd understood what was said "for the sheer pleasure of listening again to his stunningly unorthodox syntax" make for awkward reading. See also: comments about the "white underclass" in America and obesity rates in black communities.

The other stuff was only occasionally mildly amusing. I like to think I have a sense of humor about typical American quirks, but I didn't agree with some of them, or at least the slant given them by Severgnini. And even when I did agree, his brand of humor just didn't do it for me. Overall a disappointing read.

Got through the audio book of It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War. It's a memoir by Lynsey Addario, who is a photojournalist who has spent her career covering dangerous places. She has been kidnapped in war zones including in Libya in 2011. The book talks a bit about her family life (Italian-American raised in New Jersey, by hairdresser parents who eventually split up when her father came out as gay), how she found her way into photojournalism (via Argentina, as it turns out), and then mostly focuses on her career post-9/11. It's an interesting look at the job in general and the challenges women face doing it in particular. She is sometimes given special consideration because she's a woman, and sometimes denied access. She feels she has a lot to prove when she's traveling with troops. Relationships are hard to have with this sort of lifestyle, for a variety of reasons - the travel, the danger and unpredictability, the high emotions in conflict areas. She eventually finds something stable though, and near the book's end, has a child.

I enjoyed the look inside the world of people who travel to places most others are trying to get away from, and her comments about why she does her job and what she hopes to accomplish through it. The portraits of people she meets are well-drawn and as would be expected in a photographer's memoir, the descriptions of places are vivid and often talk about the quality of light. The audio book was fine, although the narrator's somewhat breathless style, while probably appropriate for the book overall made it somewhat difficult to listen to for long in a single sitting.

It was nice to read your comments on Shakespeare Saved My Life. I was wondering about it. Your review somehow relieved me of a sense of pressure to read it...although i have no idea where that pressure was coming from.

>162 dchaikin: Happy to relieve the pressure. Funny how that works sometimes, you just get a feeling that you should be reading something. I have had that sort of feeling before. Not lately though!

Update: No reading to report. I mean, I'm reading, but I'm not sure how much I'm retaining, and I'm not able to spend all that much time on it at the moment anyhow. In the home stretch of Infinite Jest, though a tiny bit behind schedule.

We leave a week from Tuesday, so I am completely melting down with the stress ... the apartment looks like a bomb exploded in it.

>164 ursula:

Don't panic, it will get done because it has to be done! :)

>165 pmarshall: That's my mantra.

And actually, unfortunately most of the stuff I'm panicking about isn't the packing or things in our control - they're visa- and apartment-related. I just really don't know whether everything is going to be in order by the time we get on the plane.

Such a huge change is coming for you, just thinking about it is exciting!

ETA — Just noticed that you are using Pimsleur to teach yourself Italian. I used it initially to learn French and after 90 lectures I felt it had given me a good foundation. It got me by pretty well on my first visit to Paris, and everyone said I had a superb accent. Unfortunately, my vocabulary did not live up to my accent! haha

>167 Poquette: Yep, big changes are afoot! At this point, I think it's so close that I just want to be on the other side of it already. I feel ready to have the mad dash done and start on the unknown.

Re: Pimsleur - I'm using everything to teach myself Italian! That, other audio courses, books, Duolingo online, YouTube videos, reading the newspaper, watching Italian news ... it's a full-court press to try to get myself ready to hit the ground at least limping. :) I should finish the second course by the time we leave, so that's good. I've used Pimsleur previously for Dutch and Mandarin. I like their courses.

I can imagine that having a great accent could get you a spoken barrage of French directed your way, which may be flattering but overwhelming!

I managed to get through the first novella in Two Lives. It's no fault of William Trevor that it's taken me this long to read 220 or so pages, it's just a product of the situation. I have very little time for reading at the moment, and what time I do have is mentally scattered because I'm thinking of all the things that still remain to be done. Anyhow, the first novella, Reading Turgenev, reminded me greatly of The Story of Lucy Gault in style and feel - it is a quiet story, told in a quiet way, but it packs a punch. Another female protagonist, mysterious and impenetrable in some ways.

Quote:"The distress engendered in him by those thoughts turns into a familiar apprehension: contemplation of this woman's life could tease away his faith more surely than all his empty churches."

I finished the second William Trevor novella, coincidentally entitled "My House in Umbria." Luckily I'm not moving to Umbria, or I'd think it was wayyy too much of a coincidence!

It was an odd story, about a woman who (shocker) has a house in Umbria, and a explosion that happens on a train on which she is traveling, and how the survivors come to depend on each other. Kind of. I wish I'd been able to concentrate on this one more, there was a lot going on that was only slowly revealed (typical Trevor, from what I've seen).

Anyway, it's done and into the donation bag.

I did it; I finished Infinite Jest. And I finished it in time, even.

I'm not giving it a star rating for the moment. I'm going to rate it: ?????

I feel a little bit like I did when I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was feeling like I was getting it, and then the third section started and I spent the rest of the movie sort of slack-jawed thinking some variation on: "huh?"

This will require more thought, and quite possibly a re-read one day when I have the book at hand again.

So . . . can you sum it up in 25 words or less? ;-)

I'll think about it on my flight to Italy tonight and get back to you on that. :)

I'm impressed that you finished in the nick of time. Safe travels and good luck on your new adventure.

>174 NanaCC: It was tight, but I'm glad I built a few extra days into the schedule, they were needed in the end!

We've all made it to Italy and are currently lounging on the bed in the hotel. Apartments to be viewed tomorrow.

I hope the weather in Italy is better than in Paris! Happy apartment hunting.

>176 FlorenceArt: Thanks! The weather has been so-so ... yesterday was changeable, cloudy to sunny and pretty warm. Now it's supposed to rain at some point today.

Apartment hunting was ... interesting. Hopefully we are in the process of getting something locked down. We'll know more soon - the timing is not the best because of the holiday weekend.